SubscribeDecember 28th, 2010
more Hillman
When left to my own devices, I seem to follow a trail laid out by books themselves. Without reading lists generated in classrooms or book club participation, I don’t think about what to read next. There’s no need. I seem to live in a universe where I am mostly blind to what exists, or perhaps deaf to the languages of frog and tree, of body and branch. There is something nudging me, though.
Call in my unconscious if you like. In a dream I had a year ago, nearly exactly, I landed in the sea with Alfonden (my non-verbal dream partner) amidst an enormous circle of sea life. Whales I think, but all I could see from the air as I descended were giant ovoid shapes, and once in the water, I could feel their mass below me but could see nothing but water and sky. Even the land was too far to make out. My eyes, you see, cannot discern what is there. I just know that it exists all around me. “Choosing” reading material is bit like that for me. I feel a sense of “there-ness” in a text, open it, begin reading and if it persists—that gut bump and slither—then I continue the process of attending to the words. So I never know what I am going to read next; I don’t know where the whales will herd me.
What, you say, has this to do with Hillman? I found a copy of Salt and the Alchemical Soul and was so taken by the title that I ordered it from the library. After finishing Dream Animals (by Hillman) I checked my library account and found that Salt was ready for pick up. So I went to fetch it. There is an essay in Salt by Hillman, as well as one by Ernest Jones and a third by Jung. The whole book is a delight because it provides such good material for comparison of psycho-therapeutic “genres,” that it clarifies the bones (so to speak) of each approach. This seems to have been the purpose of the volume, and the introduction, which summarizes each approach, allows a broad overview of each of the three narrative worlds.
Reading the included essay by Hillman is instructive of his overall approach to the mind. It is a particularizing way of seeing the world. That is, each meaning can only really be said to exist in the interaction of its component elements in the environments which give rise to them. So there is no possibility of a steadfast symbolic meaning to any one image. Or there is, I suppose, but such a fixed approach is like pinning a butterfly to a board. All the flex and undulation of life must be absent for the “meaning” to coalesce. Hillman’s approach is a bit like Heidegger in a way: everything is bound to its time and place – or every “thing” is its time and place. I find this a powerful narrative and particularly persuasive. It’s a hard one though. One must become accustomed to paradox, multiplicity, the common intransigence of material nature with respect to human desire and uncertainty.
Reading Salt has broadened my reading of Dream Animals. There was a line in that book that caught me when I first read it, that now seems to have more body. He said, “animals as images.” Ooooooh, I thought—and the phrase ran right up into W.J.T. Mitchell and lodged there under his heart. I mean what does that mean? And then of course, Hillman’s approach slaps you and says, don’t do that! Reducing it to a concept, to a sentence or phrase, eats the heart right out of it. Animals as images. Imagine.
Then there is a phrase in “Salt: a chapter in alchemical psychology” (the name of Hillman’s essay in Salt)—salt matters. Oh my is that ever wonderful, because what he means is not just that salt is important, but that salt creates matter – it matters mind – matters as a verb. The larger idea that salt is the body’s sensation (the sting of salt water in a wound, for example), a physically based metaphor that allows us to discern types of feeling, and therefore the trail to be followed to this particular moment of self-awareness, this is a wonderful story. It is one that provides us (our conscious selves) with the eyes needed to discern the particulars of each shape under the surface of the sea. But it takes time and a willingness to follow the trail laid out by others, by the body—laid out by the history of stings and tears that experience makes. It is not a trail we (our conscious selves) can blaze. It requires a willingness to be led, but also to think along the way. It is not an abandonment of conscious life, but an inclusion of the unconscious as an equal partner. It is the recognition that we are not one, still and fixed, but many in constant motion, frolicking, leaping, hiding in the world at large.
So that’s today. Tomorrow?
August 24th, 2010
Kearney and the imagination
I’ve read the majority of Kearney’s Poetics now and find it interesting. I looked him up on the nets and read a few interviews, listened to bits of podcasts, saw a bit of video and what I heard (amongst other things) was his predisposition to avoid the simulacrum-trap of post-modernism. This, I suspect, comes courtesy of his early (positive) religious training in Irish Catholicism; he seems a man deeply interested in ethics and empathy. I get that, although, obviously, I don’t come at those ideas from a religious standpoint.
How his obsession with grounding human meaning in something that we can authentically share (i.e. meaning isn’t a solipsistic illusion) is reflected in his reading of phenomenology and his understanding of imagination is as complex as it is interesting.
He says of phenomenology and imagination:
Three decisive claims made by phenomenology – as it emerges in Husserl and evolves through his existential and hermeneutic disciples – are: (1) imagining is a productive act of consciousness, not a mental reproduction in the mind; (2) imagining does not involve a courier service between body and mind but an original synthesis which precedes the age-old opposition between the sensible and the intelligible; and (3) imagining is not a luxury of idle fancy but an instrument of semantic innovation.
That’s rather a nice summary; and if each point was followed, it would lead to some interesting conclusions about what it is like to be a human being.
Another dimension of his thought about imagination is that it has an orientation to the “other”. This orientation enacts ethics. Throughout the book he examines “Kristeva’s melancholic imagination, Vattimo’s fragile imagination (and) Lyotard’s narrative imagination” each of which presents “an irreducibly ethical scruple.” I can feel the religiousness in him here, as I do when I read Alasdair MacIntyre, and can’t help but think about Wallace Stevens’ and his underlying assumptions and this apparently required sense of a moral universe. I do find it interesting that it appears that these ethical thinkers (all Catholics) have been reducing the scope of the claims they make with regard to the seating of this morality, as they must to avoid the old pitfalls of a necessary, but unworkable, god.
There are numerous similarities between these three. Whereas Kearney’s required Phenomenologically-based shift of perspective is explained as imagination ceasing to “take itself for granted and (coming) reflectively to acknowledge its own pre-reflective engagement with everyday lived projects and preoccupations,” Stevens has this as his “supreme fiction” and his requirement that imagination and reality co-adhere for an effective poem/narrative/life. For MacIntyre these same ideas are present, at least in part, in his notions of dependence and “goods of excellence.” These men are all humanists in the sense that they have seated the human capacity for ethical behaviour at the center of their lives and read it as the center of ours as well. And yet they also seem monks-in-disguise, not humanists but theists: their work seems a kind of secular application of the contemporary Christian man’s tendency to priesthood when those men aren’t in agreement with the dogma and social practices of the institutional church.
Anyway, I’ve gone off topic. It’s just that I find it interesting the similarities in religiosity, ideas about ethics and their apparent shared assumptions about what empowers and/or constitutes imagination.
One last quote from Kearney, to resonate with Stevens’ struggle between imagination and reality:
The ethical potential of narrative imagination may be summarized under three main heading: (1) the testimonial capacity to bear witness to a forgotten past; (2) the empathic capacity to identify with those different to us (victims and exemplars alike); and (3) the critical-utopian capacity to challenge official stories with unofficial or dissenting ones which open up alternative ways of being.
Compare Stevens’ imaginative force: it is the thing that will ultimately return us “not as a god, but as a god might be, / naked among them, like a savage source.” The alternative way of being to which Kearney alludes is this utopian semi-divinity, an ethical, reasonable yet passionate, human being who shares the world of possibility with the “other.” Here is the basic vision of these post-modern Catholics — an utopian ethic founded on the power of human narrative/poetic imagination. It explains their similarities, and their assumptions, but I still haven’t answered my own question. Without the battle – this “challenge” – as the motivational centerpiece, how will the imagined narrative go?
August 17th, 2010
Phenomenology, poetry and sense – the part following the final part
In part 4 I ended with this:
So what is the thing itself? A question of course. That’s why it isn’t either a subject or an object. A thing is the foundation which allows concepts to take form and so, of course, is pre-conceptual and why, at best, poetry can only aim its letters and hope to illuminate the invisible door by the sparks contact ignites.
I’ve been bothered by that since shortly after I wrote it (I was trying to go to sleep when the “botheration” surfaced). It is both true and not-true and the not-true bit worries me like a terrier at a towel. Even in my dreams that night, growl, growl, growl.
Then yesterday I was reading The Necessary Angel by Wallace Stevens.
Only recently I spoke of certain poetic acts as subtilizing experience and varying appearance: “The real is constantly being engulfed in the unreal…[Poetry] is an illumination of a surface, the movement of a self in the rock.”
I put the book down because it made me think of what a “thing” is and how an understanding of poetry contributes to our understanding of the nature and content of “thingness.”
A “thing” is a question in the sense that by orienting to the world in the questioning mode one makes possible Stevens’ subtilizing as well as the illumination of Stevens’ surface (or the door I referenced in the final paragraph of section 4 quoted above). A thing is not the words of the question, not the verbal question. A thing-in-itself, at least as far as a human being (also a thing-in-itself) can communicate the pre-linguistically experienced world, is a questioning stance. It is a way of experiencing the world that is, evolutionarily, our main way of assessing the world (including the world of our selves). Reason and language are late-comers.
The thing-in-itself that I experience during my morning walk is a questioning of many things: boundaries, kinship, danger, usefulness, pleasure potential. The thing-in-itself becomes a “rock” when I create an answer, and especially when I communicate that answer to myself (think about it) or others (talk/write about it). Poetry can undermine the current “answer” and re-open the “questioning.” This is why a thing-in-itself escapes the subject-object dichotomy, because for that decision to have been made, the thing-in-itself must have disappeared into the concept “rock.” As Stevens puts it, the real disappears into the unreal.
I would argue that a rock is just as real as the thing-in-itself, but not today. All I want to say today is that the rock and the thing-in-itself that I experience pre-linguistically are separate “things” despite their obvious relationship. That is, words are also “things” in the phenomenological sense. But, like I said, not today.
August 14th, 2010
Phenomenology, poetry and sense – part 4 (final part)
[So it turned out there is a 5th part - I can't seem to let this stuff drop. Anyway it is here.]
Imagine things freeing themselves from the meaningful, becoming, not meaningless, but anarchic and non-identical.
(Gadamer on Celan Introduction by Gerald L. Bruns)
In thinking about this sentence, I have really only started to come to grips with the term “things.” My purpose is to understand what the sentence means, to interpret it given the rather odd (from my point of view) relationship between concepts such as “thing” and “freeing themselves” and later the terms “anarchic and non-identical.” How can a thing be anarchic? What does it mean for something to be non-identical when there is no suggestion as to what it is non-identical with?
Summary: a thing in the phenomenological sense is not simply an object in a the universe of either-or. It is not the subject either. These terms are categories that can point to something in the world through language but the resultant word or concept cannot capture the totality of the thing itself.
What is it to be meaningful? Meaning is not inherent in the words but in the context in which the words are used. Can anything be meaningful? Yes. Probably. But what of it? What good is the meaning of the black sun if no other also knows it. Something has both meaning and value if it can be shared and form the basis of narrative development. That is, the shared meaning forms the basis of some other meaning. The value of the letter “e” is in the fact that it extends the envelope of erudition. “Thing” as the Phenomenologists mean it was once a lone “e” but it is not any longer. “Thing” has left its home in base matter and taken on a new conceptual life. Deleuze would be proud!
M. Bruns said “Imagine things freeing themselves” and of course “thing” did just that. But how?
“Thing” had an origin. It came with a much larger, largely unconscious, belief system. It was embedded in a world where “things” were “material object(s) without life or consciousness.” What happened was those tethers were called into question. Is a thing without consciousness? Is it without life? What does it mean to have a “life?” Can “life” be defined? Can consciousness? Isn’t it more a continuum than a black-and-white situation? If that’s the case then isn’t a human being as much a “thing” as a boulder?
Once those kinds of questions get asked the foundational belief system has already begun to restructure. Different kinds of connections get made. It’s not that the whole system goes down. It doesn’t shatter. We need foundational assumptions to achieve meaning out of inherent meaninglessness so we can’t eject conceptual frameworks wholesale but we can make it look as if we have.
Here’s an example: God is the center of the universe for most people in Medieval Europe. Then perspective comes in with the Renaissance. It didn’t make us get rid of the “center of the universe” concept but it did make us look at what we thought “center” actually meant. This new art made us see that the universe that we occupy actually extends from our point of sight and we ended up replacing god in the center with ourselves. Of course to some people it looks as if we destroyed the Medieval belief system but we didn’t really, we just changed some key factors within it.
Imagine what that must have been like at the time. The difficulty some faced in understanding the concept that the universe was to be measured by man’s measure! I’m not saying that Phenomenology is the equivalent of booting god from the center of the universe. Just that the immensity of the difficulty in reorienting our concept of “thing” is as difficult as the pre-Renaissnace man’s task.
For us this is thinking outside the duality of subject/object. Remember W A T E R M – E L O Π ? (See part 2, link at the end of the post.) If we refuse the transparency of “watermelon,” problematize the word and make ourselves question its existence then we stand a chance of opening a doorway into the sub-basement of the conceptual network which supports its meaningfulness in society. If the history of our capacity for insight (and the methods by which we achieve it) is to be taken as a future likelihood, then one way that we can help ourselves meet the challenge of this “new” concept is through linguistic play. That’s what poetry does, and why so many Phenomenologists seem obsessed by it.
In part two I asked what was outside the concept of subject/object and suggested that the way to grapple with this is through embodied cognition. The reason for this is that subject/object is likely to be a linguistic convention grounded on a long-established embodied understanding of the world. My suggestion is that the embodied “knowing” could have resulted in other linguistic orientations that were not subject/object. That it is the case that our physical presence in the world led to the development of these linguistic formulations was not necessarily so. In other words, our biological systems could have led us elsewhere just as the perceptual developments of the Renaissance could have replaced the concept of “center” with the concept of “there.” (Wouldn’t that have been fun! Instead of religions seeking the god-within, we’d have been hunting the god-over-there.)
In part three:
For me the real question is: Does language conscribe reality any more or less than the organization of our senses? I suspect not but since I also suspect that language is a development grounded in sensory structures, I think the question of what’s outside subject and object might be a misdirection at its heart.
So if it isn’t the right question what is? This is the right question. This question is how things “free themselves from the meaningful, becoming, not meaningless, but anarchic and non-identical.” It is by unmooring a concept from the question that originated it and the point of Deleuze’s and Guattari’s book What is Philosophy. How change of the Medieval-Renaissance magnitude takes place is that significant questions die and new ones force elemental reconnection. The new conceptual framework that we know as the Renaissance took hold when we found an answer and stopped asking the question.
So what is the thing itself? A question of course. That’s why it isn’t either a subject or an object. A thing is the foundation which allows concepts to take form and so, of course, is pre-conceptual and why, at best, poetry can only aim its letters and hope to illuminate the invisible door by the sparks contact ignites.
Part 1 http://tailfeather.ca/2010/07/phenomenology-poetry-and-sense/
Part 2 http://tailfeather.ca/2010/07/phenomenology-poetry-and-sense-–-part-2/
Part 3 http://tailfeather.ca/2010/07/phenomenology-poetry-and-sense-–-part-3/
July 4th, 2010
Phenomenology, poetry and sense – part 3
In part 2 I asked this question. “So what is outside the concept of subject/object and can we understand it?”
The only way I can understand this idea is to acknowledge the world that we cannot grasp through language. But this is unclear. Is there a world we language users can grasp without language? Thought about another way, experience of the world is profoundly changed by language concepts and structures. Still unclear. While probably true, this says nothing about what impacts language concepts and structures. What if those structures are reflections of the pre-linguistic world?
Let me try this:
1. Our species experienced things prior to its acquisition of language.
2. Species without language communicate.
3. Recent research in embodied cognition suggests that intelligence, reason and language are physically grounded.
4. Evolution tends to work by using existing structures and patterns of organization (whether physical or behavioural) and finding new and useful ways to use them.
5. The world is all that is the case. But contra Wittgenstein, I also think that the physical world is enough to explain the language world.
Things get sticky after this.
Imagine things freeing themselves from the meaningful, becoming, not meaningless, but anarchic and non-identical.
(Gadamer on Celan Introduction by Gerald L. Bruns)
As a poet and person with a whole raft of unusual perceptual experiences under her belt I find it almost impossible not to experience language as a entity distinct from me. I also find it impossible not to experience the world as a thinking being. I can do it but by dint of mental brute force but I cannot maintain it. Does this mean I believe these things? No. Not without evidence other than my experience of it.
I had a dream some years ago in which my synesthesia played a crucial role. In the dream I come to consciousness inside the head of a bear. That is, I am aware that I am dreaming and I am neurologically tied into the bear’s head. I still maintain my own human circuitry so there are limitations to what each sense can experience but what senses I do have can be reconfigured for the duration of the “ride.” For example, if I was in the head of a hummingbird, I wouldn’t be able to see ultraviolet as the hummingbird can because, as a human being, I simply don’t have those receptors. However, I would be able to use some sense to pick up on those frequencies – perhaps it would come in as a particular tonal group.
In the dream about the bear I smell the world with the bear but what I perceive comes in visually. I see the scent trails as coloured ribbons. The dream allows me to understand that the bear’s relationship to time is different from mine because it can smell time as scent potency. In other words, the bear’s physical (sensory and cognitive) structures organize and limit basic concepts such as time. The same organizational potential must be true for us since we evolved with the same basic environmental forces in place. Some things are important for us to know about and some are not and since no one species can sense all of it, each species has a limited, but viable, range of sensory input available to it. Perceiving too much would not promote longevity. You’d never be able to sort through it fast enough to deal with sudden danger.
So now I have an experience that I think of as a bear’s. My knowledge of bear anatomy almost certainly had something to do with how my mind came to understand the effect of sensory organization on conceptual foundations but has that really anything to do with an actual bear’s experience? And does it matter?
For me the real question is: Does language conscribe reality any more or less than the organization of our senses? I suspect not but since I also suspect that language is a development grounded in sensory structures, I think the question of what’s outside subject and object might be a misdirection at its heart.
Still, we think of memes as operating on people – that memes use people to propogate themselves as genes do. Having said that, there is no way in which human genes or human memes can exist without people. They have no intentions in the reasoned sense of the word. As an example: There are cultural ideas that work poorly in current situated human activities and there are ones that work to foster human feelings of success. The cultural ideas that promote desirable feelings are going to be repeated, i.e. be replicated or spread. There is no need for the idea to have a mind of its own.
I can think of the Phenomenological “thing” like this. Using the gene analogy, words are the bases but perhaps the 5-carbon sugar and the phosphate group are sensory structures and embodied experience and the “thing” that results – the particular gene of this analogy – is independent of us only in the sense that it is first an echo and product of us and our history.
July 2nd, 2010
Phenomenology, poetry and sense – part 2
If you remember, the idea is that phenomenology is using the language in ways that confuse some (most?) readers and, hence, contribute to the accusations of meaninglessness. I want to see if, by approaching words individually, I can come to understand what Gadamer and his compatriots experience when reading poetry.
Here again is the sentence from part 1 of this post:
Imagine things freeing themselves from the meaningful, becoming, not meaningless, but anarchic and non-identical.
(Gadamer on Celan Introduction by Gerald L. Bruns)
One important word in the sentence is “thing.”
Dictionary.com defines “thing.”
thing
–noun
1.a material object without life or consciousness; an inanimateobject.2.some entity, object, or creature that is not or cannot bespecifically designated or precisely described: The stick had abrass thing on it.3.anything that is or may become an object of thought: thingsof the spirit.4.things, matters; affairs: Things are going well now.5.a fact, circumstance, or state of affairs: It is a curious thing.6.an action, deed, event, or performance: to do great things;His death was a horrible thing.7.a particular, respect, or detail: perfect in all things.8.aim; objective: The thing is to reach this line with the ball.10.things,a.implements, utensils, or other articles for service: I’llwash the breakfast things.b.personal possessions or belongings: Pack your things andgo!12.a living being or creature: His baby’s a cute little thing.
I’ve cut some aspects of the definition out but this is enough to see two basic attributes of the word “thing.” The first is that it is a complicated word with many shades of meaning. The second is that even when “thing” refers to a life-form (item 12), it nevertheless refers to an object, in this case the baby. “Thing” in English refers very much to the objective world. Definitions 1 through 3 are the most common ways in which we understand something referred to as a “thing.”
The intensity of “thing”‘s meaning baggage is evident when we discuss animals we love. Technically a beloved pet is a thing. To be correct in English I would say “It ate its dinner already.” I don’t of course. I say “She already ate.” Calling someone an “it” is dehumanizing and quite insulting. That’s one reason I usually refer to the divine mythological “father” as “it” and not as “he.” “Are you telling me it killed all life on earth ’cause it was upset at the morals it gave us? Radical, dude.” Insulting, even without the obvious sarcasm. Using “it” for a life form impels disdain into the sentence. It implies an existence as an object as opposed to an existence as a subject.
Yet when Bruns speaks about “thing” in his introduction to Gadamer on Celan this isn’t what he means at all.
The following are from pages 20, 23 and 24 of Gadamer on Celan.
Something is thing-like if it is outside the alternatives of subject and object.
A thing is “set apart, elsewhere, outside not what we have made our own but that which is self-standing and alone…”
Things are strange when they are no longer “subject to our concepts and categories, when they escape us.”
The conceptual device that is subject/object gives meaning to “thing” in its normal use, and it is what Bruns and other phenomenologists are trying to get out from behind. “Things” are radically not-human in the sense that they are outside the limits our language/concepts place on the world. That is, there is an apple that is the concept of “apple” pointing to the world object that tastes lovely with a bit of cheese and then there is the world thing which fundamentally is not captured by the word “apple.” This world-thing is what is outside the world as seen through the lens of the subject/object conceptual framework. Ceci n’est pas une pipe.
So what is outside the concept of subject/object and can we understand it?
The best I can do at the moment is provide what I think is an example of such “outsideness” in action. Most people have had the experience of staring at a word they have used for most of their lives and then suddenly the word is alien, strange. Watermelon, for example. Normally it is only a signifier of that heavy, sweet, green skinned fruit synonymous with summer. The word is transparent or instrumental to what it signifies. The word in itself disappears into the world of what it points to. But sometimes there is that odd thing that happens and suddenly, the word fractures. W A T E R M – E L O Π bursts apart and the letters, the shapes, the history if its existence comes to the forefront and what it signifies has to share the stage with its carrier. Odd feelings are triggered when this happens. Meaning surfaces, but not linguistic meaning. That is, older, pre-linguistic sources of meaning close in on awareness. This kind of “meaning” moves in us like whales just below the surface of the ocean’s skin.
Poetry makes a habit of trying to make this feeling happen. It tries to make language visible again, tries to trigger these bodily, non-conceptual sources of meaning. So one of the things I am being asked to do when reading Gadamer, Celan or Bruns is to feel for the world-object, but further, I am being asked to see words as “things” themselves. Personally I find the first request much simpler than the second. The implication of the words as “things” in Bruns’ sense is that they have an existence in the world apart from humanity. Perhaps as memes exist? Not sure yet.
July 1st, 2010
Phenomenology, poetry and sense – part 1
Here is a sentence:
Imagine things freeing themselves from the meaningful, becoming, not meaningless, but anarchic and non-identical.
This is from a book called Gadamer and Celan “Who Am I and Who Are You?” and Other Essays. Page 20 if you want to look it up.
Does it make sense?
It’s no good that howl of incomprehension. It bears little weight especially if the ‘plaint is something that comes from the singular,”it means nothing to me therefore it has no meaning.”
More sturdy is the hundred-voice howl. L’élégance du hérisson: what? The mulitudes complaining about the incomprehensibility of this sequence of letters bears some scrutiny. But if the examination shows that the complainers are all non French speakers then a different kind of examination is required. It’s not that “l’élégance du hérisson” is meaningless, it’s that it is meaningless in this situation. What needs to be studied is not the letter combination and its claim to meaning but, amongst other things, the limitations of the assessors’ assumptions about the nature of meaning.
Still, the fact that most howlers against phenomenology appear to be kin to our non-French judges does not mean phenomenology is in fact sensible in any way other than the one in which Rorschach blots are sensible.
So does the sentence I started with mean anything? Of course it must since the author who wrote it is no dummy, and if nothing else, it means something to M. Bruns. Yet, so what. If it doesn’t mean anything to you (and it didn’t to me either) then what to do about it? Here’s the thing: it might be more profitable to assume that Bruns is speaking a language you only think you recognize. The only other option is to close the book, but then communication cannot occur and I prefer understanding, even if it comes at the cost of learning a new “language” – something at which I do not excel.
I think the key to understanding Phenomenology in some way that goes beyond the individual psychology and cultural orientation of its practitioners is learning to re-encode the words we think we understand. For example, what does “thing” actually mean to Brun? That sort of re-engagement is what I propose to attempt on my own behalf.
The question about whether Phenomenology has a “language” of its own is something I want to answer because the poet in me is attracted to sentences like “Imagine things freeing themselves.” Yet I am sceptical. I mean, really, things “freeing” themselves? How can one understand that in a way that doesn’t provide “mind” to “things” and thereby cast the universe in the image-shadow of all that is human?
So, more on this in these pages as time goes by. I am on a quest.